1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates cyclic control systems, and more particularly to pipelining techniques to improve execution of cyclic control systems.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Cyclic control systems are hard real-time systems designed to interact with a control physical processes through sensors and actuators in pharmaceutical, manufacturing, energy, and automotive industries. Inspired by control and information theory, most cyclic control systems execute applications periodically (cyclically). The scan cycle time (also known as the sampling rate) refers to the period in which the system is expected to (1) read the state of the system under control, (2) compute the corrections to bring the system to the desired state, and (3) send the corrective commands
Historically, cyclic control system took advantage of faster uni-processors to execute more functionality in software and to reduce the scan cycle times for the benefit of the control algorithms. Because the entire workload of the application has been executed in a single CPU, sophisticated pre-emptive scheduling algorithms had been developed to guarantee real-time response of these systems. Embedded processor makers are pushing multi-core technology to the industrial automation domain. This has triggered opportunities for researchers and practitioners to explore the benefits of performance, energy efficiency, scalability, consolidation, and redundancy provided by multi-core cyclic control systems.